Ancient Egyptian god of the dead, represented as a jackal or as a man with the head of a jackal. In the Early Dynastic period and the Old Kingdom he was preeminent as lord of the dead, but he was later overshadowed by Osiris. Anubis was associated with the care of the dead and was credited with the invention of embalming, an art he first practiced on the corpse of Osiris. Later assigned the role of conducting souls into the underworld, he was sometimes identified in the Greco-Roman world with Hermes. as reported by the Brittanica Encyclopedia